Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Moron is a term once used in psychology and psychiatry to denote mild intellectual disability. [1] The term was closely tied with the American eugenics movement. [2] Once the term became popularized, it fell out of use by the psychological community, as it was used more commonly as an insult than as a psychological term.
An idiot, in modern use, is a stupid or foolish person. 'Idiot' was formerly a technical term in legal and psychiatric contexts for some kinds of profound intellectual disability where the mental age is two years or less, and the person cannot guard themself against common physical dangers.
In the Romantic reaction to Enlightenment wisdom, a valorisation of the irrational, the foolish, and the stupid emerged, as in William Blake's dictum that "if the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise"; [14] or Jung's belief that "it requires no art to become stupid; the whole art lies in extracting wisdom from stupidity ...
In typical usage, retard is a pejorative term either for someone with an actual mental disability, or for someone who is considered stupid, slow to understand, or ineffective in some way as a comparison to stereotypical traits perceived in those with mental disabilities. [1]
The term useful idiot, for a foolish person whose views can be taken advantage of for political purposes, was used in a British periodical as early as 1864. [3] In relation to the Cold War, the term appeared in a June 1948 New York Times article on contemporary Italian politics ("Communist shift is seen in Europe"), [1] citing the Italian Democratic Socialist Party's newspaper L'Umanità []. [4]
Ivar Nilsson as the Fool in a 1908 stage production of King Lear at The Royal Dramatic Theatre in Sweden [5]. In his article "The Wisdom of the Fool", Walter Kaiser illustrates that the varied names and words people have attributed to real fools in different societies when put altogether reveal the general characteristics of the wise fool as a literary construct: "empty-headed (μάταιος ...
The fool is a stock character in creative works (literature, film, etc.) and folklore. There are several distinct, although overlapping, categories of fool: simpleton fool, wise fool, and serendipitous fool. The six volume Motif-Index of Folk-Literature contains (in volume four) a group of motifs under the category "Fools (and other unwise ...
Schmuck, or shmuck, is a pejorative term meaning one who is stupid or foolish, or an obnoxious, contemptible or detestable person. The word came into the English language from Yiddish (Yiddish: שמאָק, shmok), where it has similar pejorative meanings, but where its literal meaning is a vulgar term for a penis.